delicate brown fish that Joel had caught, the bread her mother
had made, the golden butter,--all of them touched her nerves with
a quick sense of beauty and pleasure. And more, the gaunt face
of the blind old man, his bony hand trembling as he raised the
cup to his lips, her mother and the Doctor managing silently to
place everything he liked best near his plate. Wasn't it all
part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in her consciousness? It
brightened and deepened. It blotted out the hard, dusty path of
the future, and showed warm and clear the success at the end.
Not much to show, you think. Only the old home as it once was,
full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear
shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no
man anything but courtesy. The glow deepened, as she thought of
it. It was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature
of this girl, she should have striven so eagerly to throw this
light over the future. Commoner natures have done more and hoped
less. It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labour of a
life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic. She knew it. Yet, if
there lay in this coming labour any pain, any wearing effort, she
clung to it desperately, as if this should banish, it might be,
worse loss. She tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far,
uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of it, to give
it to her silent gnawing heart to feed on. She thrust out of
sight all possible life that might have called her true self into
being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward.
Pitiful and vain so to cling! It is the way of women. As if any
human soul could bury that which might have been, in that which
is!

The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes,